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Configuring Percona Server with XtraDB for Fast Restarts

January, 2011

InnoDB requires a long time to restart on servers with large amounts of memory. It can take many hours to warm InnoDB up enough to serve queries quickly. The database's "working set" of data is not in memory after a restart, so queries must perform random disk I/O to read pages, and are thus too slow for production use. Percona Server with XtraDB greatly lowers database warmup time by quickly restoring the buffer pool to its state before shutdown. This enables higher uptime, and removes the need for elaborate methods of warming up servers. It reduces the cost of a server restart, permitting MySQL to scale to much larger hardware and to be used more flexibly. Percona Server's fast restart capabilities provide significant operational and cost advantages in scenarios such as cloud computing, high availability, dynamic scaling, and restores from backups.

Authors

Baron Schwartz

Vice President of Consulting

Vadim Tkachenko

CTO

Vadim leads Percona's Development group which produces the Percona Server, Percona XtraDB, and Percona XtraBackup. He is an expert in LAMP performance, especially optimizing MySQL and InnoDB internals to take full advantage of modern hardware using his multi-threaded programming background. Source code patches authored by Vadim have been incorporated by Oracle Corporation and its predecessors into the mainstream MySQL and InnoDB products.
At Percona, Vadim also designs no-gimmicks benchmark tests of hardware, filesystems, storage engines, and databases.